The Lights of London (21 page)

Yes, shy, forlorn Kitty was actually admiring herself.

And she had every right to, thought Tibs. She looked good. Just like an assured, handsome young man. Her posture had improved too. She was no longer slouching, ashamed of her height, but stood tall and proud, with her back straight, her chin lifted high and her eyes shining.

‘You look right pleased with yourself,’ said Tibs, finally hauling herself to her feet and wriggling straight into her stays. She turned round for Kitty to lace her up.

‘You know, Tibs, I feel pleased.’

‘I’m really glad,’ gasped Tibs, as Kitty tightened the laces. ‘But I’ve been thinking, after all the trouble that Jack’s gone to to make sure we get a good audience for tonight – putting up them posters everywhere and promising all them free drinks – we can’t let him down by not even bothering to do something with that hair of your’n, now can we.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kitty’s new confidence had suddenly ebbed. ‘Something?’

Tibs pulled down the layers of her costume, which she had dragged over her head, and adjusted her bosom inside the bodice. She frowned thoughtfully at Kitty’s hair and shoved her on to their single wooden chair. She weighed the thick dark waves in both hands. ‘Scissors or tongs?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kitty sounded as alarmed as she looked.

‘We’ll try the tongs and see how we go, shall we.’ It was a statement rather than a question. ‘Tonight’s too important for you to go getting all squeamish on me.’

Tibs shifted the kettle off the fire – their single source of heating, cooking and water-boiling – and gave the coals a good poke. ‘I reckon that should be hot enough,’ she said, shoving the rust-pitted hairdressing tool into the embers.

They were soon glowing a dull red and Tibs, using her underslip to protect her hands, took them from the fire and tested their readiness by touching the ends to the sheet of newspaper that served as their table-cloth.

The paper immediately caught light.

‘Tibs!’ yelled Kitty, flapping at the flames.

‘You’re all right,’ Tibs said, calmly extinguishing the blaze by slapping the kettle down on it. ‘Just hold still, I don’t wanna go burning your ear’ole.’

Kitty’s hair sizzled and crackled.

Now she really looked worried.

‘We’ve gotta get rid of most of it somehow or other and curling it up tight will make it look shorter. It’ll be smashing, you see. A beautiful mass of tight little curls. Mind you, right proper short hair’s all the go now you know. So if you’re concerned about me burning it … How about if you let me cut it all off? Have it all done with.’

‘Carry on with the tongs,’ said Kitty, resigned as ever to Tibs’s powers of persuasion.

Tibs carried on. ‘D’you know, Kit, I still have to pinch meself when I think how we’ve fallen on our feet with this double-act lark and Jack giving us this place. Beats kipping under the arches, eh, girl?’

Kitty nodded, scratching furiously at her legs. ‘If we could get these bugs to move house it’d be perfect. They’ve got right up under my trousers already.’

‘Hang on. With all the excitement about tonight I forgot.’ Tibs put her torture instrument down carefully on the hearth and dug into the pocket of her coat that was hanging on a nail on the back of the door.

She pulled out a brown, ribbed bottle and handed it to Kit. ‘I nipped over the road yesterday afternoon and bought us this. Guaranteed to get rid of the little bleeders, it is.’

‘So that’s where you were,’ Kitty said, although they both knew that even if Tibs were blindfolded and had walked backwards it still wouldn’t have taken her nearly three hours to wander along the street to Mr Robinson’s chemist shop. But it wasn’t Kitty’s business where Tibs had been and as she was volunteering nothing more, Kitty kept quiet.

‘Quicksilver and egg whites, all mixed up,’ Tibs said, clearly set on changing the subject. ‘Jack told me about it.’ She grinned as she wrapped another length of Kitty’s shiny dark hair round the metal tongs. ‘He wouldn’t want you being all uncomfortable, now would he?’

Kitty ignored Tibs’s insinuation and instead took her turn at changing the subject. ‘How do you use this stuff then?’ she asked, studying the label as though it were the latest ha’penny instalment of a torrid melodrama.

‘All you have to do is dip a feather in it, and paint it all round the bed and windows and round the door. That sees the little buggers off. But if not, then it’s back to the Krokum Powder, even if it is a load of old rubbish what makes you sneeze as bad as a potful of pepper. Let’s just hope Jack knows what he’s talking about, eh? And a cat. That’s what we need and all. He was definitely right about that. And I’m gonna keep him to his promise about paying for the cat’s meat.’

‘You’re really good, Tibs. You sort everything out.’

‘I wish I could.’

Kitty twisted round and looked up at her little friend’s uncharacteristically serious face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What, apart from the bugs, the rats, the lack of sleep and this being the first night of a big act that’s either gonna make or break me chance of ever getting off the streets, you mean?’

Kitty smiled. ‘Apart from all that.’

‘Nothing. Now stop fidgeting around and sit still, will you, or I’ll wind up pulling all your hair out and you’ll finish up as bald as a billiard ball. And nobody wants you to look
that
much like a bloke.’

‘There’s something else, Tibs, I know there is. And I’m not interfering or anything. But whatever it is, it’ll be all right. You wait and see. I promise.’

Tibs smiled ruefully. ‘I thought I was the one who was meant to look after you.’

Kitty laughed, pulled back her shoulders and saluted. ‘It must be the uniform.’

Archie had got his routine off pat. All week he’d been practising, using every spare minute when he wasn’t doing things for Jack, or fixing up the girls’ room for them.

Since losing the use of his arm, he had tried to repay his boss for being generous enough to keep him on by making sure he always did his job as well as he possibly could. But this time he had an extra incentive.

Tibs.

He wanted everything to go perfectly for her sake, as well as Jack’s. So, as soon as the warm-up act had bowed and left, Archie was ready. After a quick check that all the limelights were working along the front of the stage, he plastered a smile on his chops, trotted out on to the boards and treated the packed audience to a quick wave, and Mr Tompkins – who’d been persuaded
to return with the promise of a pay rise in the
very
near future – to an encouraging thumbs-up. He then proudly changed the title card to the one introducing Tibs’s and Kitty’s first piece. Tonight it promised to be ‘The Young Soldier is Bid Farewell featuring Miss Tibs Tyler and Miss Kitty Wallis, the Pulchritudinous Pair!’.

He then dashed back into the wings and turned down the tap to dim the big central gasolier.

This was it. They were on. Their big moment had come.

As Kitty swaggered boldly, marching and pointing, and Tibs simpered shyly, twisting her parasol and lowering her lashes, the whole audience went wild, cheering and clapping and whooping with pleasure, their enthusiasm fuelled by the generously measured free drink they had each received on admission.

Then, as Tibs began to dab dramatically at her stage tears, clasp her bosom with grief and warble her song of her undying love for Kitty, her beau, the coins rained down all about their feet.

Teezer, who’d parked himself right by the Chairman’s table and had the best view in the house, nodded sagely at Buggy as he flipped a shiny threepenny bit that landed right by Kitty’s gleaming knee-length riding boot.

‘I was right all along, Bugs,’ he said with a loud sniff. ‘That’s definitely not my girl.’

Buggy folded his arms. ‘Never?’ he said sarcastically. ‘How d’you make that out then?’

‘I’ll tell you how. I’d bet my last sprazzy that this one’s wearing queer drawers. I mean, just look at the way they’re carrying on up there.’ He nudged Buggy hard in the ribs and winked. ‘Mind you, I can’t say as how it’d put me off the pair of them. How about you, Bug?’

He was saying all this just as Jack Fisher was passing by on his way over to Tressing’s table. Teezer’s words pulled him up short. Queer drawers? Jack didn’t understand a lot of cockney slang but even to a chap from a little village up in the north-east it was quite clear what this Londoner was on about.

Jack turned to face the stage. He saw Kitty tall and erect, standing to attention with a rifle on one arm and Tibs’s dainty little gloved hand resting on the other.

They were like that?

It was a complete revelation to him. He honestly hadn’t realised. It had never even occurred to him.

But regardless of what they were and who they preferred to … well, who they preferred, the cheers weren’t dying down. If anything, they were getting louder. If their next song went down as well with the crowd as this one and the word got round – as it somehow seemed to in this business – it looked as if they were going to earn him plenty of money after all.

He couldn’t help feeling sorry though. It was a shame. He’d taken more than a bit of a shine to Kitty and as he looked about him it seemed that so had many other men in the room. And the sight of pretty little Tibs in her feminine pink frills and Kitty in her sleek, boyish turn-out was – how had Tressing’s pals put it? –
pleasing
every man in the house. In fact, they were practically dribbling at the very sight of them.

It was almost midnight when Tibs and Kitty eventually got back to their room next door. The audience, cheering until the rafters rattled, had refused to let them leave the stage until Archie, after the girls had given yet another encore of ‘Champagne Charlie’, had, to the accompaniment of loud boos and hisses, pulled the curtains and turned up the house lights.

The crowd continued to demand more – stamping their feet and clapping their hands – not realising that the girls, beaming at one another and filled with the exhilarating flush of success, had already hurried off down the back stairs and up to the safety of their room. It took some time, but Mr Tompkins, who wanted to get home himself, convinced them all to go downstairs and spend the rest of their time – and what money they had left, of course – in the bar.

Some of them didn’t have much over to spend; having got the taste for rum with their first free drink, they’d shelled out all too freely and then, having been carried away with the mood, they’d showered the stage with what was left of their hard-earned cash, the very cash that Tibs and Kitty were now counting out on their table.

Tibs had just let out a long, low whistle of amazement at the sight of the final stacks of coins, when One-Eyed Sal popped her head round the door.

‘As Mr Tompkins might say, girls, magnificent you was. Truly magnificent. A right pair of stars. But you’ll have to start locking that street door or you’ll have all the stage-door Johnnies coming up here after you.’

Tibs kissed her friend warmly on the cheek. ‘I can hold me own with any of them fellers next door, thanks, Sal. It’s that Lily Perkins I’ve gotta be careful of now. If she finds out I’ve got money in me hand the rotten cow’ll try and rob me. But I’m telling you, I’d kill her before I let her get away with it again.’

‘Talking about fellers next door,’ said Sal slyly. ‘I was standing up the back having a nose,’ she winked extravagantly, ‘slipped in after the lights went down of course. And I saw this posh-looking bloke with his two mates and I’m telling you, Kit, his eyes was out on stalks, really goggling at you, he was. And as for you,
Tibs, well, that cripple bloke’s tongue was practically hanging out like a puppydog’s when you was prancing about on the stage.’ She laughed unkindly, not noticing Tibs’s darkening expression. ‘I reckon you could be in there.’

‘He ain’t no cripple, Sal,’ Tibs said, wiping off the thick layers of powder and rouge with a flannel dipped in the china basin set in their rickety washstand. She also thought, but didn’t say:
no more than you are, with that one eye of your’n.

Sal, never one to be overly sensitive, ploughed on with her theme. ‘So how’d he get that bad arm then?’ she demanded. ‘Here, he rides a safety bike, don’t he? I’ve seen him. You do know you can get all sorts of
problems
doing that, don’t you. It’s unnatural, see. They get what they call Bicycle Face. Bicycle Foot. Even Cyclist’s Hump. Well, that’s what they reckon. I bet that’s what caused his arm.’

Tibs scrubbed roughly at her lipstick. ‘Stop talking such shit, will you, Sal. Just leave it alone, eh?’

Sal didn’t. ‘And you know what it does to a feller’s bits and all, don’t you?’ She flashed her eyebrows suggestively at the crotch of Kit’s masculine outfit that was now lying inertly across the back of the chair. ‘Sitting on them hard saddles squashes ’em all up like. And makes ’em talk funny. Should never be allowed on the roads, if you want my opinion. And what with these trams all over the shop nowadays. They frighten me, never mind the horses.’

Tibs bit her tongue. Sal was a good mate, the last person she wanted to argue with, but she could really get on your nerves once she got going. ‘How’s that sister of your’n, Sal?’ she asked, deliberately changing the subject – something in which she’d had to become an expert. ‘Well, is she?’

‘What, our Elsie d’you mean?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t let me start on her! Poor cow. Fancy being married to him
and
losing your home? That’s what I call bad luck. Got breath on him like an old sock on a hot day, he has.’ Sal shuddered. ‘He knocked her up again, you know. And you’ll never guess what she said to me.’ She didn’t wait for the answer. ‘I’ll tell you: if she couldn’t get rid of it she’d top herself by drinking lysol. And we all know what a terrible way
that
is to go, don’t we?’

‘How did she lose her home?’ asked Kitty, peeling off the tight undershift that she’d worn to flatten her bosom. Having just become a person with an address to call her own, she didn’t fancy making the same mistake as this Elsie woman.

‘Slum clearance is what they call it. Knocking all the Old Nichol down.’ As she spoke, Sal used her single, experienced eye to give Kitty’s body the once-over. If she was just a little bit fatter she wouldn’t be half bad. And with that tight uniform showing off her legs … No wonder all the fellers were panting and slobbering like dogs outside a butcher’s shop window.